Kids, this week’s edition teaches you an important lesson: don’t watch the Marvel Cinematic Universe while you’re taking personality assessments.
Or maybe you should.
Do you ever find that instead of bringing who you are into a role, a role can shape you?
That’s something I’ve been thinking about ever since my friend Eric Sullivan at Thumos took the PrinciplesYou personality assessment from Ray Dalio’s firm. When Eric tagged me on LinkedIn, I had to try it out.
After completing the free assessment, you’re presented with an archetype. Mine is the Inspirer, described this way:
“Typical Inspirers have a unique blend of hard-charging, goal focus, and belief in esprit de corps that distinguishes them from those with less interpersonal finesse. They have strong interpersonal abilities framed most by their desire to really get to know people at the core of who they are, not just as a passing interest. Their people know they care about them and will go out of their way to help them. They are most effective when the people they lead are efficient, satisfied, and meeting established goals.”
The next most relevant archetypes for me are the Impresario (meaning I “love to entertain, engage socially, and facilitate great experiences with others”) and the Explorer (I “love to take in new knowledge” and am “drawn to new experiences through intrinsic motivations”).
Most fitting for me is that there’s some inference to how I’m an introvert in an extrovert’s career. As a bookish, oft-hermitlike, self-directed Explorer of a kid, I’d come out of my shell when having a chance to be an Impresario-esque speaker or host, and my deeper interest in others developed slowly.
I wonder what the assessment would have looked like in June 2018, in the weeks before I launched Serial Marketers. How much did the community shape me? How much did the roles of building it, organizing it, staffing it, moderating it, and willing it into being shape me?
It had to, right?
Or was I the community organizer all along without a community?
What about the would-be pastors out there without their flocks?
What about the would-be flock members out there without their proper pastor?
Even if you have some untapped potential in you, it often takes others to bring it out.
As a personal example, let’s rewind further. When I was working at eMarketer starting in 2001, I joined as an editor – a perfect introvert’s profession, except for the occasional confrontation required with analysts when you mark up their work and secretly want to edit it with a paper shredder.
A year or into into my eMarketer job, after I had started an interview series for their newsletter, CEO Geoff Ramsey said to me, “David, you like talking to people. Would you like to do our PR?” That remains the best job interview I ever had.
Geoff had inadvertently led me to that marketing path that might not have otherwise materialized.
Previously, a chance conversation in 2000 led me to pursue editorial work instead of a career in education. Having watched the series Loki, it feels like a series of forking paths. We become our own variants, not knowing how the other variants fare.
This happens in personal realms too.
The most striking example of this for me has been the role of fatherhood. Everything in my world changed over the course of a few moments, but as my daughter gets older, she gives me a greater appreciation for who I am at my core.
Learning about her has been the most striking way to learn about myself; children are the world’s best teachers.
Similarly, when I played the role of husband, that shaped my identity profoundly. As a single co-parent, it shifted, though parts of the job of being there for the family — including everyone who cares for my daughter — remain intact.
The dichotomy of nature versus nurture doesn’t go away. Whatever roles we take on, the question arises again:
How do you shape your environment, and how does your environment shape you?
If you take the PrinciplesYou quiz, I’m curious how you do. We can also add each other as friends (invite me via my personal dberkowitz at gmail address) to compare styles.
What I hope to learn more sometime is what your variants are like. How do you think you’d have fared if you took another path? Do you think your variants are instantly recognizable?
If one of your variants is you in alligator form, I’d like to meet them even more. But please keep them at more than arm’s length.
In the Disney+ series, Classic Loki (played by Richard E. Grant) says about all the Lokis, “We lie and we cheat, we cut the throat of every person who trusts us, and for what? Power. Glorious power. Glorious purpose! We cannot change. We’re broken, every version of us. Forever.”
Classic Loki adds that Alligator Loki is “overly sensitive, like the rest of us.”
The main Loki (Tom Hiddleston) replies, “Okay, fine. Willing to accept that.”
Perhaps he should be. Perhaps some of our traits are fixed.
But even with those fixed traits, on some paths, we wind up as Loki, and on other paths, we wind up as Alligator Loki.
Whether we grow up in a swamp or in Asgard could make all the difference as to how those traits emerge.
David
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OFFICIAL UPDATES
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